Background

Tracking biodiversity in the Nile Delta

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Background

Tracking biodiversity in the Nile Delta

Quantifying biodiversity

How do you visualize the health of an ecosystem? How do you create a meaningful dashboard for a long horizon problem? These were the major issues we had to struggle with on this project. Our goal became figuring out a way to define and display meaningful, actionable information in a clear and attractive format.

As our client was a watch dog agency we determined that the content in our dashboard should be highly specific and technical.

RESEARCH: ECOSYSTEM & CRITICAL FACTORS

The first thing we had to do was learn about the ecosystem; the types of species in the region, as well as the critical factors and indicators that might be important to track. To identify this information we used a combination of primary and secondary research methods including literature review, competitive analysis, and interviews.

Dragonflies as a species are dramatically affected by even small changes in their environment. This makes them a great indicator of the health of the ecosystem as a whole. By tracking this and other factors we were able to paint a fairly complete picture of the health in the region.

PROCESS & ITERATIONS

We began by wire-framing our dashboard, trying to figure out what widgets would be important for displaying the critical, actionable, and contextualizing information our client would need to see. We quickly moved through a number of higher resolution iterations before settling on the version we felt was most communicative.